


in the heart, a kind of fighting

by auxanges



Series: at the end of the stars [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, F/M, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, at the end of the stars au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-12
Updated: 2017-03-12
Packaged: 2018-10-03 00:26:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10231421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/auxanges/pseuds/auxanges
Summary: “Get up,” says Eridan, over you like a swell. “Getup, Fef Peixes, on your fuckin’ feet. Or are you so eager to die?”





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thescyfychannel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thescyfychannel/gifts).
  * Inspired by [and with her they came](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3846088) by [thescyfychannel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thescyfychannel/pseuds/thescyfychannel). 



> i made a new friend and rp partner who makes me emotional about seadwellers on a daily basis so this was of course the only natural response (i know its an old pic but i also really. really love [this concept](http://saccharinesylph.tumblr.com/post/18562671843/the-witch-of-life-i-love-wild-shakespearean)). sold my soul to erifef in this year of our lord, two thousand seventeen  
> [best served cold, with a side of violin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MCjU-Du3eI)
> 
> "eridan teaches her weakness. he is ruthless in his lessons, and as he knows her best, trained her, trained _with_ her, he knows her flaws and strengths inside and out, and hammers them relentlessly. he is a strict teacher, knocking her down and ordering her up again, and each time she comes snarling for his throat, he lectures her on telegraphing and obvious movements and letting her anger get the best of her."

He’s at his quietest when he concentrates, when the omnipresent frown on his face is a little smoother across his brow, when the tip of his tongue peeks out from between his teeth. It spreads to you, slow like an oil slick, all of the weight and none of the threat, for once. 

Now, he cups your cheek with one hand, spreads paint over your skin with the thumb and index of the other. It’s old; you feel older; you feel like a child playing at something higher. 

“Keep still,” he mutters, tracing a line under your cheek. It’s a devastatingly chaste gesture, all the control of a boy who walks warpaths with no hesitation. 

You keep your eyes forward, fixed on the wall behind his head. “Are you shore we should do this?”

“More sure than I ever been of anythin’ in my life,” he replies, rapier-quick, then, “turn,” guiding your head leftways. 

“Keep still, turn, glubbing _pick_ one!” You kick your feet in midair, restless—they don’t quite reach the floor, from your seat. “I don’t reely see the point in this if all we’re doing is training, Eridan.”

He lets out a rush of air that could be a laugh, maybe, if he didn’t look so focused. “Because,” he says, with all the pale patience in the world you didn’t even know he possessed, “it’ll be easier if it feels real.”

One of his capes is draped across the back of the chair, worn and cool against your bare shoulders, and you don’t miss the way his eyes flick to it from his handiwork and back. 

You huff. “What’s _real_ aboat it? We’ve sparred _before_ , Eri, you’re not—”

“I’m not )(er,” Eridan interrupts, “an’ I ain’t pretendin’ to be, neither. She’ll cull you, Fef, the minute she sees you a princess proper-like, and she’d be in her full fuckin’ rights.” This time, the breath-laugh that escapes him sounds brittle, the creaks of weathered wood caught in a gale. “Any of us would be. You know this.”

And you do. The knowledge sits heavy on your chest, fixes to your feet like lead. 

Your name is Feferi Peixes and you are _afraid_. 

He daubs paint at your temples, brushing stray locks out of the way. “I know,” he says, an answer to something you didn’t voice out loud, but he’s been that way a long time—Eridan draws your hopes out of you, your fears, your wants and needs, makes them bright and tangible things. “You want me to teach you, Fef, I’ll teach you. But the Condesce ain’t gonna stop for you to take a water break or tie your shoes.”

“I don’t wear shoes.”

He bumps his forehead against yours. “Don’t be cute.”

“Impossible! Soary!” 

When he leans away again, capping the pot to set it on the vanity, you don’t recognize yourself in the mirror. Eridan’s painted you immortal that you are, glowing tyrian over your cheeks, the bridge of your nose, your forehead where the circlet pushes your curls away. You feel a pressure ease off your shoulders, and think maybe he was onto something. 

“Eridan—”

“Five minutes,” is all he says, already on his way out of your block. “And remember, yeah? I’m in my rights.”

You prod at a cuttlefish that drifts past and pretend the fear in your chest is at something else, for all that you know him. 

* * *

When you face him, it’s something out of a memory that someone’s tried to rebuild without all the parts. 

You grew up together. You’ve done this before, with lower stakes— _loser gets extra feeding duty for half a perigee_ , silly things you passed off as innocence, as if seadwellers had any innocence in their blood to begin with. 

The details are off, now: Eridan’s ditched the scarf, keeps his clothes tight over sinewy muscle, no weak spots to grab. (You watch him look you over, wary eyes to your own newer, practical getup with a funny expression on his face, but the first thing you’d told him was that if you were gonna die it was going to be as you, not )(er, and that’s what he’d been talking about, hadn’t it?) Where his sleeves are rolled up, faded scars etch over his skin like a stupid sacrifice. You ache. 

The two of you circle one another; your feet criss-cross, and he paces, every inch a prince. Your fork sizzles into existence almost before you realize it, cold and certain in your palms. You run a thumb over the shaft and spin it between your hands. 

Eridan didn’t hatch a close-range fighter. He’s swapped his rifle for a staff, the kind you both used when you were starry-eyed kids dancing around each other, and he holds it steady in one hand, arms extended at his sides like a martyr. 

Your fork scrapes across the floor when you charge at him. 

You feint last minute, spinning out of the way, and he follows: your weapons come together in a crash that rings in your horns, your teeth. You shove, and he twists in the same direction, shifts his grip and brings the staff down across the back of your calves. 

It _hurts!_ You stagger, on the defensive. He doesn’t stop, drawing up to his full height (you can’t quite remember _when_ he got that tall, only that you were eye to eye and then you weren’t). “Your centre’s too high,” he says. It’s icy, detached: the timbre of it runs cold down your spine, jagged and unforgiving. 

When you come for him again, you keep low, and he drops to meet you, swings a leg in a wide arc to take out your feet. You hit the ground hard, blinking up at him. 

“Still too high, _and_ now your legs are broken. You’re better than this, Fef, don’t embarrass me.”

Blood roars in your ears. 

He bends backwards when you rear up, fully prepared to stick him with the pointy end of your fork. The both of you map out a dangerous kind of waltz, pressing closer and receding, tides of your own making. He meets your strikes easily, like he’d memorized every one of your movements as if they were one of his stupid history schoolfeeds—knows what you’ll do before you do it. 

You hit the ground a second time, a third time, and a second and third time you spring up, fins flared and snarling and angry at him, at everything _but_ him. Eridan meets you, impassive, and it gets on your _nerves_ , the one time he decides to be an emotionless brine-for-brains is when he’s taking you apart, knocking you down and flowering traitorous pink bruises across your skin! 

Your attacks get a little harder, a little more vicious, and when one of the tines of your culling fork whistles past his jugular something _blazes_ in his eyes. 

He knocks you onto your back: your loosely bound hair’s around you like an inky halo, your gills snapping at nothing in particular. He taps one of them with the tip of his staff. You _hiss_. 

“Get up,” says Eridan, over you like a swell. “Get _up_ , Fef Peixes, on your fuckin’ feet. Or are you so eager to die?” 

You screech, go straight for his abdomen before you’re even proper vertical again, but he wraps his hand around the shaft of _your_ weapon ( _yours!!!_ ) and _yanks_ , and you stumble forward until you’re stopped by the staff across your throat. 

His fins mirror yours, and behind his glasses his eyes are swimming slits in a violet deep enough to drown in. Your boy is a terror, and when he shows you all his teeth in razor-sharp rows it’s a wonder wigglers don’t have daymares of Eridan Ampora. 

“You’re mad,” he comments, like he’s making small talk and not pressing wood into your airway until you cough. 

“Yeah, no _ship_ —”

“You’re mad,” Eridan repeats, “and that’s a right fuckin’ stupid thing to be, in a fight.”

You drive your knee into his stomach, sick-satisfied with the breath he sucks in (you see the shift of his clothes, you see the blacks of his pupils, you see the thrum of his pulse at his neck). _Hypocrite_ , you want to say, _liar_. But you can’t, because Eridan knows you, he’s always known you and he’s always known when he’s right.

“You want to die?”

“No—”

“Words.”

“I don’t want—”

“Louder.”

“I DON’T want to DIE!!!”

“Prove it.”

The fork in your hands whistles as you twirl, force the edges from your movements into smoother things. You are Feferi Peixes and you were hatched to do _great_ things, and no arrogant prince of yours is going to keep you down. 

He sees the change as you press forward, eyebrows raised, bringing up his staff to parry your weapon with more twists, more ducks and sidesteps to find every place you’re not covering. You’ll be colourful as coral, this time tomorrow night, and that suits you fine—you heal fast, yourself and the world around you, that’s why you’re doing this, isn’t it?

The next time he knocks you down, you slide between his legs and rise again, and drive your foot into the curve of his spine. He crumples to his knees, and you have your fork at his throat faster than you’d have thought possible, even a couple sweeps ago. The points dig into the skin, enough to coax beads of blood to the surface, the violet he’s offered to spill for you before. You watch him swallow, his tongue snake out again over his lips. 

For a long, long moment, you stand there above him, watching each other with hurricanes in your eyes, tremblings in your limbs. Your weapons are stored with twin pops of ozone. 

When you remember to breathe, you extend a hand, will it to hold as certain as his own. Your system is one made to rule; your breaths come at a crawl, even with adrenaline ebbing away, sinking into the floor beneath your feet. He accepts it, and you haul him to his feet with highblood strength you don’t remember asking for, but do remember him teaching you to use, what feels like two lifetimes ago. 

Eridan says, “There’s hope for you yet, Princess.”

Victory beats its tentative wings in your chest. 

When he turns to leave, you call after him. “That’s it? There’s so much moray to _do_ , Eri—”

“Fuck no, that’s not _it_.” He looks at you over his shoulder, the ghost of something like a smile passing over his features in a flicker. You must be tired; imagining things. “Same time tomorrow. Keep your lessons close.” 

He takes a step, hesitates, then turns proper. “And hey. Suits you, the paint. They’ll sing your stories, when this is over.”

You want so badly to bereef him. “…will you do it again? Tomorrow, I mean?”

“Shore, Fef. All the tomorrows you need.” 

**Author's Note:**

> fights writers block on an attempt to fight writers block. classic


End file.
